Tag Archives: Dan Lepard

Dan Lepard’s Chocolate, Stout and Raisin Slice

[Edited to take out links which are now ‘dead’]

I never hear the call to make things that involve coconut, that’s because I don’t have it in the cupboard. However I do have chocolate, cocoa, flour, golden syrup, vanilla, butter, oats, raisins, egg, soft brown sugar, and one tin of stout left over from bun making – yes, all present – so I don’t have to go shopping for some obscure ingredient.

It’s not that I like chocolate…

This is the first time I have mixed a cake entirely in a saucepan; so the kitchen was disappointingly tidy all the way through, unlike when I make bread.

Mackeson’s stout is a classic, sweet and creamy black beer made with milk lactose and whey. I Googled it to find out what was in it. Wikipedia inform me that is why there is a milk churn on the tin. I never notice things like that unless they are pointed out to me; I thought it was a rook from a chess set.

It feels a bit crazy pouring a can of beer into a saucepan and boiling it up with oats and cocoa as the first stage of a cake – cocoa beer porridge – reminded me of Babette’s Feast where the sister is making ale-bread soup. But I have already used stout in Dan’s new Easter bun recipe so I was on familiar territory. I am quite proud of my home made vanilla essence, something I learnt from Celia at Figjamandlimecordial which also features in this slice.

What’s it like? It is soft and moist with the oats and the stout, not as dense as you might think either, goes very well with a nice cup of tea on a sunny but chilly Friday afternoon. The cake part is chocolatey, juicy with raisins, creamy….and not too sweet – I am not good at describing taste but I am sure you get the idea. The icing is sweeter, as icing should be, but you could always make a different icing if you want less sugar. I am not going to write out the recipe here, it is only a click away after all! [Edit: this recipe is no longer available on the internet as far as I know, if I see it in a new Dan Lepard book I will update again]

Hot Cross Buns and Mellow Bakers

Mellow Bakers are a bunch of people who want to bake all the recipes in Jeffrey Hamelman’s book Bread; not in too much of a rush, not too hardline, not too obsessive – sounds perfect! Anyway I joined up, sounded like fun and would encourage me to bake some new breads and think a bit harder about how I do it and how I can do it better!

So far….

I made thehot cross buns in March – the Mellow Bakers trial run – I managed very successfully not to follow the method at all and just mixed an all-in-one dough, but it survived as choc chip hot crosses, probably not quite what JH had in mind! I made three different sorts of hot cross buns this Easter, easy Mumsnet ones, overnight stout and spice buns (both fab Dan Lepard recipes) as well as the choc chip ones and they were all different and better than last year’s according to the Eaters of Buns, so that was all right, phew!

And

I had a crack at bagels, which I wrote about here, which wasn’t so successful, but on the plus side – I now know the theory of bagel making, both ways to shape them and have a collection of links to different recipes and got to watch some great clips on the Mellow Bakers site of pro bakers baking bagels!

Anyway, that’s where I have got up to. We were very busy in the garden yesterday, as the temperature climbed to an official 18.9 C (about 23 in the sunshine). So we were clearing leaves, clipping brambles, seeing new shoots emerging everywhere. A blue sky day at last!

Here is another batch of those Dan Lepard spice and stout buns – recipe here – so good we had to have more once the first lot were eaten up. They freeze really well so that’s what we have done!

A bread for a warm spring day

Over the weekend I made yoghurt – I think I overdid something, I used one of those easi yo packets, and it all separated into curds and whey.

So I drained the curds through a muslin square and was left with a big bowl of golden yellow whey which I stuck in the fridge, remembering that there was something about making bread with it.

I have been reading Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz

Published by Green Books and reviewed by David Whitehouse here which made me curious so I got the book at the weekend. Only part way through it, but very interesting so far…..

Yesterday I found the whey in the fridge and decided I had better use it.

I looked through the Handmade Loaf and based this loaf on Dan Lepard’s white maize and wheat loaf but used wheat and rye flours. I used more whey and less leaven, simply because that is what I had to hand and was worried that the whey might go off if I left it another day while I built up the starter.

100 g white leaven (which had been fed a couple of tsp of the new yoghurt the day before and been refreshed and was a bit over excited and smelt sweetly lactic!)
400g or so of yoghurt whey
350g of very strong white flour
100g of whitewholewheat ( American flour)
50g of rye flour
8g fine sea salt
5g of fresh yeast

I made just over one kilo of dough, which I proved in two oval bannetons. They were quite slow to rise to start with as I mixed them with the whey from the fridge so it was all quite cold. Plus the initial amount of leaven was smaller so I expected it to take its time.

I mixed the dough at 11 am and popped the shaped loaves into bannetons 3.5 hours later. Finally into the oven at 220 C with steam at 6.30 pm.

I lowered the temperature after 15 minutes to 200 C and again to 190 C for the last 15 minutes.

It made a beautiful fragrant loaf with a pale yellow translucent crumb and a dark golden brown crust.